It is interesting that O’Donnell’s report of his returning the Crowley file to Mr. Simon of the attorney general’s office in October 1919 now appeared under the heading “Alleged Radical Activities” (my italics) rather than, as hitherto, “Radical Activities.” O’Donnell withheld a copy of the July 17, 1918, examination, which in his report was mistakenly dated “1919.”13 Its contents would serve as meat for a “Memorandum” on Crowley prepared for “Mr. Hoover” by Washington’s Department of Justice, Bureau of Investigation, in early January 1920, after Crowley had returned, unhindered, to Great Britain.
Before Crowley made his “escape” from the United States, he spent his summer retirement at Montauk not in undertaking subversive radical activity but in taking a deep trip down memory lane with extensive sammasati trances to uncover previous incarnations. The resulting meditations were nothing less than colorful, and he wrote them up in the diary document The Hermit of Oesopus Island, because they extended work accomplished in the Hudson River Valley the previous summer.
On July 4, Crowley, or “essence of Crowley,” got back to the incarnation before Marius de Aquilis after finding that as Aquilis he had been born in a north Italian city, possibly Florence, coming to Rome in adolescence. Before Marius he was a woman, Claudia. He couldn’t be sure of the surname other than it ended in “ini,” possibly Venturini. Claudia—known to enemies as “La Verolina”—had huge masses of orange gold hair, which sounds like Hilarion: that might explain the attraction! A cardinal was Claudia’s first lover, a black magician who vowed her to Satan. She hated her mother; a fat, blond harlot whom Claudia poisoned at aged fifteen. She had faulty reproductive organs that made her sterile and insatiable, as well as “tight and spasmodic.” She was finally burned at the stake, and as the flames crept up, “Satan” appeared again in the smoke and transfigured her into the flames that fed on her flesh, making her death “an exquisite pang of bliss.” A nobleman’s wife who was present, three months pregnant, received “her” as his next incarnation, and he was born as Marius de Aquilis.
Then on July 16 at 8:40 p.m. he realized that he had been Pope Alexander VI (1431–1503), the debauched Renaissance pope born Roderic Borgia. “Crowley” took pride in the fact that he was the first lover of Lucrezia Borgia, recalling a thousand details of the intrigue. He took oaths to the Romish Church without realizing they would inhibit his intentions, resulting in “Division” when he finally realized he wanted to reinstitute paganism. He reckoned the masses were with him, preferring Venus to “Mopish Mary,” but theologians were “too narrow-minded to agree,” taking, as they did, the fathers of the church seriously. He felt this all explained later incarnation Lévi’s “flirtation” with Rome before he abandoned Catholic ministry for magic. He felt that these experiences explained why he had at last decided to follow Siegfried and not to mend the broken sword but to melt it down and forge a new one from the elements. As Alexander VI (his middle name and number, he observed), he had been ignorant enough to think that he had altogether failed, and explained why “A.C.” had never taken to Renaissance things. On July 16 he got a brief glimpse of “the Magician” who finally worked up to the flower that was, in retrospect, Alexander VI. He then had a sense that he was in the mid-seventeenth century a “lord of the Sabbath”—presumably referring to the spirit of the witch cults that induced such hysterical persecution in that period. Somehow he knew what became eventually Jeanne Foster, identifying her as “the Devil’s Mistress” that gave Golden Dawn member John William Brodie-Innes’s 1915 novel its name.*195 Somehow Crowley incited free love, free thought, free speech, free act in a way quite crude that he would not make the error of repeating.
He then “got into” a former life as page to the last grand master of the Knights Templar, Jacobus Burgundus Molensis (Jacques de Molay), who was roasted alive in Paris in 1314. As page, he was initiated into the Eastern-occidental mysteries of the temple, making great progress, only to be murdered fouly by emissaries of jealous French king Philippe le Bel, who brought ruin on the Order. The page’s name was something like Hugo de Larens, which sounds a bit too much like Templar Order founder Hugo de Payens, who died some 180 years before his successor, de Molay.†196 He had an Arabic nickname, and it was fury at the killing of de Molay that led to his incarnating as a magician who made a great and terrible oath against Christianity, “which I have still not worked off. Nor will I while the accursed thing still poisons the air of our sweet Mother Earth.”
This magician was born in an Eastern Templar preceptory “far hidden in Asia”—and at this point Crowley’s “memories” enter territory redolent of George Gurdjieff ’s alleged adventures in the latter magician’s Meetings with Remarkable Men (still unwritten and much of which perhaps unlived).*197 Crowley saw the birthplace as a crag fortress with a cultivated garden beyond which rose wasted hills then great mountains. Was it called El Latifu or El Azizu? he wondered. Templars at this site were apparently tremendous magicians. Even his birth as Baal Zakar was an act of magick: the Templars’ share in the great mythical oath of vengeance against the powers that destroyed the temple. Crowley’s trance led him to believe that his incarnation as the pope was Baal Zakar’s effort to rule the world by intellect and to express the revolt against the destroyers of the temple “in the physical.” This failed, Crowley believed, “because there was not enough initiation to back up my Magick.”
On July 29 he had memories of his “Great Incarnation.” Crowley’s description of the village setting is most interesting. He recalls a village in a valley clustering about a monastery with square towers of adobe or “some such stuff.” There was a mountain path from the village, nearly a day’s walk up. The gate was guarded by two “Mongolians.” Beyond trees was a stone shrine, a “conical white stone set in a cube.” The latter detail is highly reminiscent of Yezidi tombs (called qubbe) in the sacred valley Lalish, in northern Iraq, burial place of one of the greatest Sufi masters of the thirteenth century, who identified himself with the spirit of God, united in samadhi, and mouthpiece of revelation. Crowley believed his Holy Guardian Angel, Aiwass, was somehow identified with the “Peacock Angel,” Melek (Lord) Ta’wus, the Yezidi lord of the created universe. Crowley, however, had never been to Mesopotamia, and that just might be why he thinks the vision he had of this place he “inclined to place in the Hindu Kush”—as, interestingly, Gurdjieff placed one of his key monasteries of the universal truth in Meetings with Remarkable Men. Crowley’s incarnation saw a glacier, “like Mont Collon,” in the Alps. He lived there many years and was “pretty sure” the monks were Mahayana Buddhists, of sorts. He, however, was not one of them. Far down the valley was a way over mountains to the south, which landed him in Persia after a long journey. Iran, incidentally, is reachable across the mountains southeast of Lalish. Crowley was sure all this took place before Mohammed, when the Persians were “Ghebers”; that is, Zoroastrians.
On August 2, 1919, Crowley experienced a memory of a great consistory of adepts, at which “the man who was afterwards Mohammed” attended. The policy of Crowley’s supernal Order AA was discussed. He remembers being present with the beings who manifested in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as Allan Bennett, Theodor Reuss, Helena Blavatsky, and George Cecil Jones (whose face appears as the satyr in the May Morn painting; Jones founded the AA with Crowley in 1907). Other “great mystics” voted solidly against “doing anything at all” as far as revealing initiated secrets to humankind were concerned. It was decided at the conference that “we” (presumably the aforementioned) decided to work in the West. “He” got the pagan and ritual work, which ended with Alexander VI. Reuss (Frater “Merlin,” cofounder of the O.T.O.) afterward was Adam Weishaupt (1748–1830), founder of the Illuminati. George Cecil Jones “worked the CRC act” (that is, the Rosicrucian movement) and “subsequently went wrong.” This had consequences in America, where, according to the Confessions, “I met the heads of four flourishing cults who claimed to be Rosicrucians. Not one of them had so much as h
eard of the Fama Fraternitatis or the Chymical Marriage.”14
“Pre-Mohammed” was, Crowley recalled, “the biggest man there, but his plan left him in a minority of “One.” He said he’d do it anyhow. Of course the time wasn’t ripe. Another man took care of art, learning, and such, and was presently Paracelsus (1493–1541). The great issue was, Are we to initiate the people? I voted yes, with certain limitations—I am still in trouble with the muddle of that! The ‘quiet mystics’ abstained from voting, not that they approved, but they thought that we should try it out and learn a lesson. Iehi Aour [Allan Bennett’s name in the Golden Dawn] did some Catholic Mysticism in Ireland after this, as his job. I wish I could get a full report.”15
A fragment survives of a lost peroration called The Book of the Great Auk (May 14, 1919, 6:30 p.m.). Even though it is dated before Crowley’s summer of sammasati meditations at Montauk, its contents have a direct bearing on the question of whether there could be any real value in reincarnation at all.
Crowley begins with a question over the unity of the cosmos.
All elements must at one time have been separate—that would be the case with great heat. Now when the atoms get to the Sun, when we get to the Sun, we get that immense, extreme heat, and all the elements are themselves again. Imagine that each atom of each element possesses the memory of all his adventures in combination.
Crowley was wondering whether the essence of a person, being perfect as he held it to be, gains anything by successive incarnations or experiences. While the essence might remain the same through time, the acquisition of memory through experience might be worthwhile; it could become “something more than itself without ceasing to be itself, and thus a real development is possible.” Was he subconsciously registering a desire to leave this world?*198
One can then see a reason for any element deciding to go through this series of incarnations (God, that was a magnificent conception!) because so, and only so, can he go; and he suffers the lapse of memory of His own Reality of Perfection which he has during these incarnations, because he knows he will come through unchanged.
There must, he wrote, be an “infinite number of gods, individual and equal though diverse,” Crowley concluded, “each one supreme and utterly indestructible. This is also the only explanation of how a Being could create a world in which War, Evil, etc., exist. Evil is only an appearance because (like ‘Good’) it cannot affect the substance itself, but only multiply its combinations. . . . If we presuppose many elements, their interplay is natural. It is no objection to this theory to ask who made the elements—the elements are at least there; and God, when you look for him, is not there. Theism is obscurum per obscurius [explaining the obscure by the more obscure].”
Crowley then speculated on whether, as a result, Good was as good or bad as Bad, because duality was necessary to acquisition of expanded experience and potential. He then opted for the way of the Tao as sound, because it ignored involvement with moral issues, coasting supremely on the Way, avoiding extremes. He then began to think about the notorious third chapter of The Book of the Law, with its bioevolutionary indifference to moral issues: “Damn them who pity!”; “the law of the strong; this our law and the joy of the world”; “Compassion is the vice of kings.” This brings him to the realization that the facts of Nature cannot be ignored.
Magicians seem to forget too often that magick must reckon with the facts of nature. I recall the objection of D.D.S. [George Cecil Jones] to Ra-Hoor-Khuit [the god of Liber AL’s third chapter]; but D.D.S. went into the anti-aircraft service . . .
Crowley’s point was that whatever humanitarian considerations Jones might have entertained, reality dictated his having to operate anti-aircraft guns in the war. While objecting to Ra Hoor Khuit’s promise of war and cataclysm, he had, nonetheless, to defend himself and others from its effects; pacifism would not have helped.
We may not like the 3rd chapter of CCXX [Liber AL] but facts is facts. On the other hand, magick has been defined as the attempt to master nature, to set her right. The question is, is this justifiable? If we would set her right we must believe her to be wrong and this, as previously stated, seems to be the point of view of Choronzon [demon of Dispersions and disintegration, the formless, loss of unity]. If this is the case, magick is nefas [meaning abominable, impious, criminal] and the way of the tao the only proper course.
P.S. Well, this getting to a simplicity gives one the whole memory, etc, of the complexes with utter understanding. But these become subconscious in the New Being. The Ipsissimus reborn. My thoughts tonight are ineffably dazzling and profound; each phrase a Sunburst.
Here is Crowley’s first intimation that there was one grade left to him, almost impossible to conceive of, according to the Golden Dawn system; Ipsissimus 10° = 1▫: the absolute divine essence—the quinta-essentia of Man as divine revelation, the Brahmin’s Atman, his own very Self, beyond concepts and differentiation—God, in a way. Was he unnerved at the prospect? One might think he had sufficient to contend with being a Magus with a Word for which few had ears to hear.
And then it looked like he might be beaten to it. On September 26, Charles Stansfeld Jones wrote to Crowley, implying a claim to be Ipsissimus, the highest grade of the Order, having identified himself with the Absolute, the sepher of “Kether,” crown of the supernal triad of the Tree of Life. Crowley doubted Jones’s presumption and accepted an invitation to go to Bill and Kate Seabrook’s farm at Decatur, Georgia.
But before he left Montauk, Crowley wrote from there a hasty but interesting note to Russell, in reply to Russell’s asking him about the Qabalistic number of his neophyte motto: γενεσΘαι (genesthai = to have been born).
Montauk N.Y. die [sign for Saturn] = Saturday
CF [Care Frater = Dear Brother]
93
γενεσΘαι adds 3 + 5 + 50 + 5 + 200 + 9 + 1 + 10 = 373. It is the aorist infinitive of γενω, I am born, become &c. I am not quite sure about the Hebrew equivalent; the root GN is the important thing. Sanscrit [sic] JAN to be born. The point is that this root includes the idea of KNOW as Gnosis, Cognizance, &c. Gentle; Gentile, Ingenious, Gonorrhoea [!]; it’s all the same idea.
Tao is a pretty good equivalent, so far as anything can be so; but Tao isn’t a motto.
I expect to be here till about Aug 4, then N.Y. for a day or two to fix Eq x 2 matters: [the follow-up issue of The Equinox, which fell through completely due to resistance in Detroit] then probably back here for a bit, but I’m not sure as this is only a Small Magical retirement.
93: 93/93
Thy brother 666
Don’t try to use Greek Qabalah (numerical) for nobody knows anything about it.
Here’s a good mantra for Muladhara [chakra] “Ac Pan Pan! Pan Pan Pan!” It adds to 666.16
Crowley passed to Russell a great deal of esoteric knowledge only, in the end, to be repaid with scorn. In the meantime, Crowley encouraged Russell greatly (perhaps too much), writing to him again at 953 Vinewood Avenue, Detroit, from 63 Washington Square on August 11.
Care Frater,
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law.
I was very glad indeed to get your letter; it encouraged me a great deal; at the moment I was rather fed up with the Work, to say the Truth for once in my life. You do seem to have grasped the Law, and the principles of Magick; and moreover have the guts to put it into practice. Your danger is lack of experience; but if you are cautious, and use the scientific method, and don’t try for too much at first, you ought to do great things.
I am in N.Y. to try to put the Equinox through; owing to Gordon Hill’s dishonesty, and his partner’s incompetence [Ryerson], I am over $4000 short. I cannot find that any of the Detroit people (who make such a show) care in the least if the Equinox never comes out again. I hope I am all wrong. Anyhow, the Gods have whips both for asses and for mules. Also poison for rats.
Love is the law, love under will. Fraternally ever,
66617
Decat
ur must have come as something of a relief, for even as Crowley painted beneath Georgia boughs, the work in Detroit, despite Jones’s and Russell’s efforts, mostly fell apart, and the next issue of The Equinox never got further than the proofs, and the pudding wasn’t eaten.
THIRTY-FIVE
End Game
Bill Seabrook began his journalist career as reporter, then city editor on the Atlanta Chronicle, of which city in DeKalb County, Georgia, Decatur is now a developed suburb. Decatur in 1919 was less integrated into the Atlanta conurbation. Many of its old farms have since been remodeled as pleasant, leafy estates, with spacious gardens and an abundance of attractive houses in shady willow and white oak glades in the Cliff Creek area. Bill and Kate owned one of the old farms, and to it, in September 1919, came Aleister Crowley.
Seabrook was unhappy working for the Hearst news organization. Believing he had genius as a literary man, he found Crowley the right man to encourage his dreams. Crowley assumed he had a gift for realizing the genius of every “star,” and under his influence, Seabrook’s sense of the high calling of literature grew, despite an obvious talent for popular journalism that raked in the bucks and opportunities for travel and excitement. In the 1920s, for example, he journeyed to West Africa and to Kurdish Yezidi homeland in Iraq. Crowley reckoned that, separated from his influence, Seabrook would “backslide.” Despite “sporadic attempts to escape from his environment,” as Crowley put it, “the caress of this world and the deceitfulness of riches choke the artist’s word and it becomes untruthful.”1
Crowley would have direct experience of Seabrook’s backsliding when Seabrook submitted for publication sensationalized and sensationally distorted accounts of Crowley in the context of witchcraft in books and articles throughout the 1920s. In the autumn of 1919, however, everything went well between them, with ample opportunity for Crowley to enjoy Kate Seabrook’s passion for him. Leah is unlikely to have joined Crowley in Decatur. “I passed a delightful six weeks in the south,” wrote Crowley in his Confessions. “Political and social conditions were of great interest. The standardized surface has overspread the south, but it has not completely smothered the old violence of passion and prejudice. The hatred of the Yankee and his fear of the Negro are as great as ever. In the latter case it has increased. The recent revival and the nation-wide spread of the Ku-Klux-Klan is one of the most sinister symptoms of recent years.”2 Sinister symptoms persist today, a century later.
Aleister Crowley in America Page 66